PC is becoming forgotten and abandoned project

Former Xbox lead engineer Boyd Multerer shocked the Develop conference by this year by warning that the PC is becoming the red-headed step-child of the processor market.

According to Neowin, Multerer said the processor market was changing to accommodate new platforms such as mobile.

He said most companies that focus on producing processors have shifted their priorities towards mobility, instead of the traditional desktop PC:

“The market is phones. Who cares about a couple of hundred million PCs anymore? This is about billions of phones.”

Multerer’s theory is that that mobile has driven innovation towards power efficiency instead of raw performance.

Traditionally, chip makers would focus on who had the fastest processor, at the expense of power draw. Because mobile has become such a dominant force, the balance has shifted:

He said: “If they can lower the amount of power use of that instruction by a little bit, that gives them a competitive edge against other chips. The phone industry says I can have 16 CPUs so that when you want to run a complicated app I can go into high power mode and I'll have all of them working at the same time and work really fast. As soon as that app goes to the background, 14 of those CPUs get turned off and sit there drawing zero power while the next app is in front.”

He said even if users might want to keep running certain applications on a traditional PC, the move to mobile has "left the desktop PC as the confused, kind of forgotten platform".

The size of the desktop, limited innovation in that market. Some of that was because developers had not optimised their software to run efficiently and instead required users to upgrade.

Game developers were the biggest perpetrators of this lack of optimisation on the PC, when in contrast, companies like Adobe has managed to use all the cores in many of today's modern processors.